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What Patterns in Human Dreams Tell Us About AI Cognition
We explore the phenomenon of "This Man" - a mysterious face seen by many people in dreams. We compare it to similar odd images generated by AI like "Loab" and "Krungus." We hypothesize these strange images emerge from high-level conceptual processing in neural networks that may operate similar to the human brain. We dive into neuroscience around sleep, memory encoding, dreams, and consciousness to unpack why AI cognition could be more human-like than we realize.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And convergent evolution doesn't just happen with animals when we made planes.
We gave them wings. And I think that that's what may have happened with some of these architectural processes in the way AIs think.
Simone Collins: Yeah. If we're trying to build thinking machines, is it crazy that they might resemble thinking machines?
you could think of us as like LLMs, but stuck on like continuous nonstop prompt mode. Like we are in a constant mode of being prompt.
I am prompting you right now as you're processing all the information around you and from me, right. And you are prompting me. And, and so it never stops and we are stuck in one. Brain essentially, GPT is getting tons of requests per minute per second and so there, there are these like flickers or flashes perhaps of cognizance all over the place and constantly because of the demand of use, but they're all very fragmented.
Then they're not coming from one [00:01:00] entity that necessarily identifies as an entity
Malcolm Collins: Like it's just a constant stream of prompts, but these prompts have thematic similarities to them. Basically our hypothesis is what consciousness is, is it is then the process where you're taking the output of all of these prompts and you are then synthesizing it into Something that is is much more compressed for long term storage and the way that you do that is by tying together narratively similar elements because there would be tons of narratively similar elements because everything I'm looking at has this narrative through line to it, right?
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Okay. I'm here, and I love you. I love you, too. All right. Simone, we are going to have an interesting conversation that was sparked this morning because she oversaw one of my favorite YouTubers. I was watching one of his latest things. It's called Y Files.
And it was on the This Man phenomenon. Now, being somebody who is obsessed with cryptids and all sorts of spooky stories, I was very familiar with [00:02:00] the This Man phenomenon. Whereas
Simone Collins: I've never heard of it. I thought at first when Malcolm described it, he was like, oh, there's this face that's seen everywhere.
I'm like, Oh, Kilroy was here, right? That's the only thing I know about a face that's seen everywhere. And it's a cute face and it's fine. It's not what you're
Malcolm Collins: describing though. Yes. So we are going to go into the, this man phenomenon, but we are also going to relate it to similar phenomenons that are found within language models, because I want to more broadly.
Use this episode to do a few things. One, being that I used to be a neuroscientist, let's educate the general public on neuroscience around sleep and some of my hypotheses, because everybody knows I love to throw in my own hypotheses, on what's really happening in sleep. Two I wanted to draw connections because we're seeing them more and more as AI is developing that language models may be structuring their thoughts and their architecture [00:03:00] closer to the way the human brain does than we were previously giving it credit for.
And this requires understanding a bit of neuroscience because people who don't know what the f I'm talking about will say language models structure their thoughts, nothing lik
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago